Samantha Power, U.N. nominee, highlights Obama’s genocide problem

By
Rafael Medoff/JNS.org

Click photo to download. Samantha Power speaks at Harvard Law School in 2010. Credit: Chensiyuan/Wikimedia Commons.

The
nomination of Samantha Power for U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations has
drawn the Jewish community’s attention to her controversial 2002 remark about hypothetical
U.S. action against Israel to protect Palestinians from genocide. But Power’s
confirmation hearing before the U.S. Senate is also likely to address a broader
question: How can lawmakers judge her record on responding to genocide, when
the government agency she has headed for the past year has no office, no staff,
no phone number, and no public record of taking any action to fulfill its
stated mission—to prevent atrocities in Darfur and elsewhere around the world?

Just
weeks after President Barack Obama was inaugurated in 2009, the International Criminal Court
indicted Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir for spearheading the Darfur
genocide. He was charged with sponsoring the Arab militias that were “murdering,
exterminating, raping, torturing, and forcibly transferring large numbers of
civilians, and pillaging their property” in Darfur.

The
Obama team included many outspoken advocates of U.S. action against the Bashir
regime. Before becoming U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice had
publicly urged airstrikes on Sudan. Samantha Power wrote a book urging U.S.
intervention against perpetrators of genocide. Joe Biden, as a U.S. senator,
called for imposing a no-fly zone over Sudan. As a presidential candidate in
2008, Obama himself vowed, “I won’t turn a blind eye to slaughter” of civilians
abroad and said, “There must be real pressure placed on the Sudanese
government.”

Developments
on the ground in Sudan during Obama’s first term provided good reason for U.S.
action. In 2009, Bashir’s mass expulsion of foreign aid agencies led to
widespread starvation among genocide survivors. In late 2010, the ICC reported
hundreds of civilians murdered and thousands displaced in renewed attacks by
government-sponsored Arab militias against villages in Darfur. By the summer of
2012, New York Times columnist
Nicholas Kristof was reporting from Sudan about new “mass atrocities that echo
Darfur” against non-Arab tribes in the Nuba Mountains.

Yet
the Obama administration’s response was lethargic—and worse. The new U.S. envoy
to Sudan, J. Scott Gration, told the Washington
Post in 2009 that American policy should be based on “giving out cookies”
and “gold stars” rather than punishing Bashir. In 2010, Gration told the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee that the U.S. now supports having Bashir judged by
a local Sudanese court rather than by the ICC (even though that would increase
the chances of an acquittal or a light sentence). In 2011, Gration’s successor,
Princeton Lyman, told an interviewer, “We do not want to see the ouster of the
[Bashir] regime, nor regime change.”

Click photo to download. Caption: Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir. Developments
on the ground in Sudan during President Barack Obama’s first term provided good reason for U.S.
action, including Bashir’s
mass expulsion of foreign aid agencies that led to widespread starvation among
genocide survivors, but the Obama
administration’s response was lethargic, writes Dr. Rafael Medoff. Credit: U.S. Navy.

Meanwhile,
Bashir was brazenly flaunting the ICC indictment by traveling openly to various
Arab and African countries. Even though some of those countries were major recipients
of U.S. aid, such as Egypt, Iraq, and Libya, neither Obama nor advisers like
Dr. Power publicly criticized them. Bashir had become the least-wanted
most-wanted man in the world.

In
the face of all this, disheartened Darfur advocates were given new hope by the
president’s dramatic 2012 announcement—from the podium of the United States
Holocaust Memorial Museum—that he was creating an Atrocities Prevention Board,
with Power as its chair. The most optimistic among us were tempted to see
parallels to the remarkable lifesaving work undertaken by the War Refugee
Board, after pressure by congress and Jewish activists forced President
Franklin Roosevelt to establish that agency in 1944.

And
there was substantial public support for Obama’s initiative: a poll by
Penn Schoen Berland found 69 percent of Americans believe the U.S. should “prevent
or stop genocide or mass atrocities from occurring in another part of the
world.”

With
public opinion on its side, would the Obama administration finally turn a
corner in its genocide policy?

Unfortunately
not.

When
U.S. Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA) introduced a bill in 2012 to suspend
non-humanitarian aid to countries that host visits by Bashir, the State
Department worked behind the scenes to bury the measure. A petition by 70 leading
Holocaust and genocide scholars to Dr. Power, urging her t

o back the bill, went
unanswered. (Ironically, Power, in her book, had urged the U.S. government to
use “economic sanctions” and pressure on its allies to combat genocide—a fact
noted in the petition.)

Asked
by a Fox News interviewer in January
2013 why the U.S. had been silent over a recent Bashir visit to Egypt, outgoing
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton acknowledged that Bashir “does need to be
held accountable for what happened on his watch as president” (Curiously, she
made him sound like a bystander rather than a perpetrator). But, she
emphasized, the U.S. had to “prioritize” and focus on maintaining good
relations with Egypt.

Last
month, the Obama administration announced that a delegation representing the
Bashir regime would soon visit the U.S. Heading the delegation will be Bashir
adviser Nafie Ali Nafie, a prominent participant in the Darfur massacres. A
petition by 107 genocide scholars to Obama, urging him to cancel the visit, has
so far gone unanswered.

Ironically,
countries far smaller and weaker than the United States have shown much more
backbone on this issue. Uganda, South Africa, and even tiny, deeply
impoverished Malawi have threatened to arrest Bashir if he attempts to take
part in international conferences in their countries. The president of Brazil
stormed out of a banquet rather than sit next to Bashir. Yet the U.S.,
apparently worried about angering Bashir’s allies in the Arab League, continues
to stand idly by as the Butcher of Darfur travels freely.

And
the Atrocities Prevention Board under Samantha Power? Thirteen months after it
was established, it still has no office, no web site, no phone, no public
record of action, not even a single statement issued about Bashir’s travels or
other issues related to atrocities in Sudan or anywhere else.

No
wonder the major news media seem unaware of the Atrocities Prevention Board’s
existence. In reporting Power’s nomination as U.S. ambassador, the New York Times mentioned only that she “worked
on human-rights issues on the National Security Council during Mr. Obama’s
first term.” The Washington Post
described her as “Obama’s adviser for multilateral affairs and human rights
before resigning earlier this year.”

Has
the Atrocities Prevention Board been preventing atrocities on the sly?
Presumably Obama would not have chosen such a high-profile setting for the
announcement of the Board’s creation had he intended it to be some kind of
top-secret operation. Hopefully Power can resolve this mystery at her
confirmation hearing.

In
the meantime, while Obama named Susan Rice to replace outgoing National
Security Adviser Tom Donilon, and Samantha Power to replace Rice, there was no
mention of who will be replacing Power as head of the Atrocities Prevention
Board. But given the Board’s inactivity, does it even matter?

Dr. Rafael Medoff

Dr. Rafael Medoff is
founding director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies. His
most recent book is “FDR and the Holocaust: A Breach of Faith.”

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